(to go to Bangkok Blues click here)

(to go to Huaiyin Blues click here)

A half an hour after touchdown at Harbin airport, still jangling with culture shock and an 18 hour flight, I found myself standing on a street corner watching a beautiful Chinese girl sob her heart out while lying face down on the pavement. I’d been picked up by Uncle Liu, a scrawny pipe cleaner of a man with a splay-toothed grin, and Joe, a Canadian Chinese teacher who was there because he could speak English, and Uncle couldn’t.

We’d paused in downtown Harbin to drop off a package I’d brought through from
Australia for them – Uncle had bounded up the stairs into an apartment building while me and Joe went looking for a shop to get something to drink.

The July night was warm and the sky was clear and starlit, and as we approached the corner I could hear the moaning and sobbing of a woman. I was looking up at all the apartments as we walked, thinking it was coming through an open window until we rounded the corner and there she was. There was a man too, beside her, a handsome Chinese guy with a good haircut, wearing a beautifully cut suit made from some kind of shiny material - squatting on his heels beside her smoking a cigarette while patiently gazing into space as she writhed and sobbed her heart out in front of him.

Both of them ignored us as we approached, so we made like they didn't exist. Joe asked me if it had been a good flight as we stepped around them. I said yes, it had been.

Joe went into the shop while I waited outside, mooching about looking around as I wondered what I was doing here. I’d come straight from Australia that day to live in China for 6 months, and as interesting as it might well be, nonetheless, I was sick of traveling. I'd been living pretty much in in transit for the last 6 years, but usually only for 3 monthly blocks. This latest venture - 6 months in the Chinese outback, was getting a bit extreme.

But back home this last time I’d been in bit of a jam. I’d spent the last eighteen months staying at my mother's house while finishing a book that in the end nobody wanted to publish, as well as a rewrite of a novel which I'd had been told, at 900 pages, was much too long.

I'd had no job, no assets, and nowhere to live, so it had seemed as if I’d reached the end of the line, until this offer of a job as an English teacher in Da Qing came up and made me pack my suitcase again. I said goodbye to my mother, who cried because she'd gotten used to my company, caught a bus to the airport and walked through those departure doors and into the sky once again.

So here I am, standing under a Chinese night sky in Harbin, watching this beautiful Chinese woman sob her heart out under the streetlights, and it's forming an oblique kind of metaphor in my head - a tone, if you like, of recent events and how they’d led me to this strange place.

Right then I heard laughter behind me, coming from a dim little alley next to the shop. It was kind of a high pitched cackling, interspersed with the staccato chatter of excited Chinese. So I went to the corner and, looking down, saw two Chinese guys squatting n the middle of the paved alley under the hard blue glow of a fluro, doing something with a blowtorch - one of those pressurized kerosene ones that you have to pump.

At first I thought they were waving it back and forth between them trying to get warm, but then I saw they had some kind of animal skewered on a spit which they'd set up in the middle of the alley, one guy turning it while the other played the flame of the blowtorch back and forth.

They see,ed very happy with their lot, chattering and laughing in-between stopping to take turns at cutting off pieces of seared flesh with a large knife, wolfing it down. They looked like laborers of some kind - worker’s caps perched on the backs of their heads and the recycled army jackets I’d already seen on road workers as we'd driven up. Their faces looked like photos I'd seen of an Egyptian mummy, sort of leathery, wizened, but it could have been the yellow light from the flame of the blow torch.

Joe appeared and pushed a bottle of water at me.
"Check it out," I said, then waited for some sign of surprise as he squinted down the alley. He sniffed, then glanced back at me.
"Dog," he said, then took a pull at his bottle of water.
"Dog?"
"Yeah, they've got a habit of eating dogs. They find a dog, they eat it."
“Right. So ... who are they? Beggars?”
He looked back down the alley and then back at me and shrugged. “Nope. Dunno. Just guys.”
I looked back down the alley. "So ... is this normal activity in Harbin?"
"Uh, no, but in China you get used to the unexpected," he said.

We watched the guys eat dog for a while then decided we should go back to the apartment building to wait for Uncle to reappear from his errand. The beautiful Chinese girl was still there, prone on the pavement weeping her heart out. And the guy was still squatting beside her in his suit, smoking a cigarette as he looked beyond into some distance all his own.

We stood a respectful distance away, and as I sipped water from the bottle, I got to wondering what must have happened here. I mean, they looked reasonably affluent – very affluent in fact. Didn't she have a nearby apartment to sob in? I mean, she was extremely well dressed – they both were; her in a silk cheongsam, pressed white jacket and gold jewelry – him in a well cut suit and expensive leather slip on shoes which looked Italian. Maybe it'd been a spontaneous thing - he said something she didn't like, so she collapsed on the pavement. But still, wouldn't you think she'd just go home? Why here?

Standing there taking slugs from our bottle of water, time passed, and I got to thinking about that roasting dog in the alley. I couldn’t work out how they could roast a dog with a blowtorch without burning it.

I asked Joe.

At first he gave me a blank look, like he didn’t know what I meant. So I asked again.
"… I mean, there wouldn’t be enough heat," I said. "Not enough to cook it without burning it …"
Joe thought about this, but he didn’t look particularly interested. He took a slug of water, and we both went back to gazing at the girl.
Then he said, "Maybe it’s kind of a fast food thing, you know, like those rotisserie things they have in Lebanese restaurants."
"Yeah…"
"Like … they cook the top bit, then cut that off and eat it while they cook the next layer.”
“Right.”
“Sort of gives them something to do while they eat, don’t it."
"Yeah, that might be it."

I walked back to the corner and looked back down the alley. The two guys were still squatting there, chattering up a storm while chewing on dog. What Joe said - it made sense. How else would you cook the dog with a blowtorch. I went back to where he was still watching the crying girl.

"I think you’re right." I said.